Omnivore
Puerto Rico’s recovery is essential
Lanny Thompson (UPR): Colonial Governmentality in Puerto Rico and the Philippines: Sovereign Force, Governmental Rationality, and Disciplinary Institutions under US Rule. Jon Lee Anderson on Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico’s neo-colonial legacy. Why Washington should finally make Puerto Rico a state: As the hurricanes have made clear, all of America has a stake in the island’s success. Puerto Rico’s recovery is essential for our economy: Even if you ignore the obvious moral necessity for the
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Paper Trail
PW recently asked women who work in book publishing if they’ve experienced sexual harassment, assault, or predatory behavior in the workplace. “We found that in spite of publishing’s high percentage of female workers (it’s estimated at roughly 80%), the industry still has a sexual harassment problem.” Simon and Schuster has announced that it will publish …Syllabi
Women in Rock (Criticism)
Quinn Moreland Rock criticism has long been kind to a certain species of (male) character: wannabe experts who are prone to ranting and/or raving and proudly displaying their knowledge of niche subjects. It’s hard …- Civilizations in Crisis: Chinese Speculative Fiction Darren Huang
- Reading Play Rennie McDougall
- End of an Era Emmett Rensin
Daily Review
Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell
It’s 1984 or 1985, Prince and the Revolution are in California, and they decide to drive out to Joni Mitchell’s house in Malibu for dinner. All devotees—Prince says his favorite album ever is 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns—they chat and admire her paintings, and then … 
Interviews
Andrew Durbin
Over the past few years, I’ve heard Andrew Durbin read a handful of times from material that would comprise his debut novel, MacArthur Park, Blushing, he’d rush through the reading, his anxious timbre at odds with the confidently intelligent voice of his prose
…- It’s 1984 or 1985, Prince and the Revolution are in California, and they decide to …
- We tend to think of The Odyssey as the adventure story of Odysseus’s troubled, …
- I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I’ve always felt that Saul Bellow did some of …
- In 2007, Suzy Hansen was a reporter at the New York Observer. Hansen was twenty-nine; …
- IN THE CLASSIC American game show Concentration, contestants vied to clear matching …
- The word totalitarianism has an ominous ring. At the height of the Cold War, in the …
- Vivian Maier was an ambitious and prolific photographer who conducted her work in the …
- American punitiveness—in our policing, courts, prisons, and law—can’t be fully understood …
- In the first chapter of Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir), we learn that the …
- ACROSS THE MIDDLE EAST, the Islamic State is on the run. The caliphate has been crushed …
- BEGINNING THE SECOND PARAGRAPH of her 1973 essay on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury …
- The mid-twentieth-century Spanish Mexican artist Remedios Varo once wrote a fan letter …
- Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County and Jesmyn Ward has Bois Sauvage—neither real, both …
Reviews
Conversation
A Broken Story: Jenny Erpenbeck's Refugee Novel
John Domini
Overseas, Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel has carried her to fresh levels of acclaim. She’s won not only the Thomas Mann Prize, in her native Germany, but also Italy’s Strega Europeo, something of a Booker for the Continent. Now the book is out in this country, under the title Go, Went, Gone, and though Erpenbeck’s four previous have won critical esteem—the New York Review of Books deemed her last novel “ferocious as well as virtuosic”—here,
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